Wireless computing technologies provide untethered access to the Internet and other networks. One of the most critical technologies for wireless networking (or Wi-Fi) is the IEEE 802.11 family of protocols promulgated by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Currently, the protocols are widely adopted in wireless devices such as laptop computers, tablet computers, smart phones, and network appliances.
Wireless devices complying with standards such as IEEE 802.11 have control over how a connection to wireless network is made. Namely, a wireless device selects an access point among a number of access points that have sent out beacons advertising a presence. The beacon includes a BSSID (Basic Service Set Identifier) as an identifier of the access point. In turn, the wireless device sends data packets which include the BSSID of the intended access point. Unintended access points receiving a transmission merely ignore the data packets.
Problematically, wireless devices also inherently have control over uplink accesses to wireless networks. An uplink access is necessary for sending data to the wireless network from a wireless device, such as URL requests, queries, control information, and the like. Although an access point can control an amount of data over downlink accesses, there is no control built into the protocol for uplink accesses of, for example, aggressive wireless devices. Consequentially, a wireless device can consume more than a fair amount of bandwidth on a network, or overburden a processing load of network components. This problem is exasperated for public hot spots or large companies that have a large amount of wireless devices connected at the same time. For example, the number of collisions can degrade channel quality when too many wireless devices uplink at the same time.
Besides having lack of control over aggressive wireless devices, the current protocols do not allow varying quality of service. In other words, a guest user or guest device is granted the same uplink access privileges as a critical user or critical device. As a result, a guest engaged in unproductive Internet surfing has the same media access rights as a company president presenting networked data in a board meeting.
A client running on a wireless device is not always desirable. For instance, guests connecting to a public hot spot for only one time would be burdened with the process of downloading and installing a client. Furthermore, many computer users are weary about malicious applications downloaded from the Internet.
What is needed is a technique to provide uplink access control for connected wireless devices. Further, the uplink access control should be extendable to a per-wireless device level. Finally, the technique requires no reconfiguration of a wireless device.